Building @share_willow.
New York, NY
Joined April 2009
- Tweets6.8K
- Following4.1K
- Followers4.2K
- Likes22.9K
Ryan Shank retweeted
There are so many seasoned software executives who are completely out of their element with the types of products that will breakout in the next few years.
Over the last 20 years, their brains were wired to build apps that deliver value by outputting deterministic results, but AI produces value from probabilistic results. This is such a different way to approach how something should work.
Young people who are thinking in this way from the outset will be at a significant advantage -- in the same way they were advantaged when thinking about how products could be social in 2010.
Ryan Shank retweeted
Most of my motion videos are now done fully by agents.
Best approach I found looks sth like this:
- Scribble out the rough storyboard
- Hand it to an agent with a short description
- Agent builds each scene with real components from the codebase
- Skills & references handle the camera, transitions, cuts, easing and pacing
It's impressive how fast you can get to sth solid, if you have the right workflow & skills.
Ryan Shank retweeted
Granola runs ~1,700 ads on Meta alone
SF forgot paid ads exist while every $0→$100M AI startup runs them on steroids:
> Cursor - 1,100 active ads / 6,400 tested🤯
> Wispr Flow - 820 / 3,300
> Emergent -410 / 7,000
> Replit - 110 / 5,500
> Base44 - 560 / 2,100
> HeyGen -400 / 1,700
> Viktor - 620 / 1,300
> Lovable - 300 / 990
> Gamma - 110 / 350
> Framer - 710 / 2500
> Superhuman & Grammarly - 71 / 1800
(Data from Meta Ads Library)
Ads are cool again!
Ryan Shank retweeted
.@owner has rocketed past $100M ARR automating everything for restaurants with AI, and 83% of its new customers now start inside an AI product
But it hasn't quite been that simple, or straightfoward
The top 7 lessons from @AdamGuild's rebuild:
#1. Your customer should never have to log in
Every login to fix what the software did is a failure. That breaks your pricing, your funnel, and your board deck.
#2. An LLM can build a website. Only Owner knows which version sells more food
They check 90 SEO and CRO factors and have order data from thousands of live restaurant sites. The model has none of that.
#3. Customer research goes stale in 90 days
Owner's own interviews said restaurant owners feared AI. Three months later a pizzeria owner scanned a QR code at their booth and proved it wrong.
#4. Your devs already have Claude Code. Almost nobody has an agent handling coordination
Owen does 90% of Owner's builder coordination and files PRs straight out of Slack.
#5. AI doesn't necessarily make you leaner
Owner is hiring more builders because demand outruns what they can ship. That only works if you have the demand.
#6. When someone says AI saved their reps time, ask what it did to revenue
More call volume is an input. $2M+ in ARR per rep is the result.
#7. Measure how long you take to go from customer complaint to shipped
A restaurant owner complained on a Friday. Adam shipped the fix Saturday afternoon
youtu.be/sJM9BrgpxwI?si=uhcY…
Ryan Shank retweeted
Avoiding hierarchy as you scale — 10 things that actually work:
1/ Don't have an office. Sit with the employees.
2/ Sit in customer support and take calls every couple of weeks. Multiple benefits!
3/ Publicly praise people who disagree with you on Slack or the wiki.
4/ Push for 15:1ish reporting ratios. Flat orgs move faster.
5/ Host quarterly dinners at your house with 8 people who don't report to you. Multiple benefits!!
6/ If you fly private, shut up about it.
7/ Bring non-direct-reports to offsites.
8/ Get good at assigning DRIs who can drive projects across org boundaries. Single owner, no committee. …If you ask a committee to look after your plants while youre away, you’ll come back to dead plants.
9/ Take hard questions at all-hands and don't spin. If you need to think on a tricky one, say so — then actually follow up on slavk, wiki, wherever.
10/ Publish your priorities publicly. Transparency kills hierarchy faster than any org redesign.
Bonus/ Jensen is mostky right. Dirrct report 1:1’s should only last a short while. Criticizing (with care) and praising in public irks, but works.
Ryan Shank retweeted
I’m a plumbing company owner and I’m using Grok @bot to automate a ton of office manager work. Here’s what I’ve done in the last 24 hours:
Ryan Shank retweeted
Entrepreneurship is like a marathon.
The longer you stick around, the thinner the crowd gets.
Ryan Shank retweeted
Met a 4x successful entrepreneur last night ($100m+ in exits) who told me the most important thing to do in your early career is to follow the right leader
You should look for three things in a leader:
1. Competence - they are excellent at their craft and leading ppl.
2. Character - they are high integrity, a person you can trust to put your interests first.
3. Ambition - they are motivated to push themselves and their teams forward.
It is extremely rare to work for someone who meets all three criteria.
Ryan Shank retweeted
.@travisk's pitch for why young people should join his new startup Atoms:
"I'm not out there pitching some lame-sauce dude who doesn't want to work... This is why Atoms is cool. You're not dropping an app in the App Store. You're automating a 2 million pound machine [in the Amazon] going 35mph carrying gold."
Ryan Shank retweeted
Introducing Vendo (YC S26), the customization layer that lets your users build their own features and micro-apps on top of your product
For 50 years, software has been shipped one way for everyone. That era is over.
With Vendo, every user shapes your product into exactly what they need. This is what software of the agentic era will look like. This is Vendo.
One command to install. Open source.
@runvendo @nourzahzah
Ryan Shank retweeted
lol this is funny. I just want to say a couple of things and then I’m done with this convo. First off this was a small personal check from us outside of Mantis. We do not do consumer via our fund but personally we can invest in anything we want to support.
Ryan Shank retweeted
VCs: There’s no AI talent outside of SF
Anthropic: we need a 16 story building full of people in NYC
Great news: @anthropic is leasing an entire 16-story building at 330 Hudson St. The company is doubling its workforce here to 1,000+ employees.
NYC is rapidly emerging as one of the world's most important AI hubs. An important source of growth for our city in an otherwise challenging economy.
Ryan Shank retweeted
If I was starting a new company today, I'd start an agent business.
SaaS was a multi-billion dollar market. Agents are a multi-trillion dollar one.
How to build I'd build an agent business from 0:
Spot the niche → find a workflow with a paycheck → shadow the human → spec the agent → run it manually first → build the smallest useful version → sell the pilot like labor → productize the repeatable parts.
Entire episode is live on @startupideaspod 100% free like always.
SaaS sold software and let your team use it to get the job done. An agent business sells the job already done. That shift matters because labor is a multi-trillion dollar market, far bigger than software ever was.
Watch
Ryan Shank retweeted
“$150K AEs closing $2M+ ARR per year. Outbound BDRs generating $100K in closed-won ARR per BDR per month. 4X the ARR per rep compared to direct competitors.
None of that happens by accident.”
How @owner’s CRO Closes $2M+ ARR Per Rep With AI youtu.be/BzA8bTjFIgk?si=KgR2…
Ryan Shank retweeted
I've been using HTML for planning, speccing, exploration, code review, reports and a lot more.
teapawt.org/trq212/status/20528098…
Ryan Shank retweeted
Today, I'm incredibly excited to announce @withdefault's Series A led by @8vc and our new product.
We spent the last three years building the tools and orchestration layer companies like @owner and @AirbyteHQ have used to build infrastructure across their go-to-market functions.
Today, we're launching the first real-time data layer for go-to-market, a powerful new revenue agent, and a suite of tools for revenue teams and their agents.
It's Day 1.
Ryan Shank retweeted
54% of Anthropic's new enterprise logos in 2026 came through self-serve.
Self-serve enterprise. Real ACV. Real terms of service. No AE in the loop.
Anthropic's Head of Industries Eleanor Dorfman walked through at SaaStr AI 2026 last week how they rebuilt the entire sales org in 30 days after Claude Opus 4.6 broke their demand curve in December.
👉The constraint: couldn't 3x or 4x the sales team fast enough without lowering the recruiting bar.
The thesis: don't buy a new stack. Thread Claude through the one you already have.
What they kept:
1⃣ Clay for enrichment
2⃣LeanData for routing
3⃣ @salesforce as system of record
4⃣@Gong_io for call coaching
5⃣Ironclad for contracts
6⃣@slackhq for everything else
What they added: Claude as the connective tissue between all six.
The four moves:
1/ Killed the PLG vs SLG orthodoxy. Launched enterprise self-serve in January. Intercom Fin guides the buyer through the journey. Now 54% of new enterprise logos.
2/ Threaded Claude through the existing stack. Every AE starts the day with a "morning brief" Skill that pulls context from Gmail, Gong, Slack, Salesforce, @intercom, Greenhouse.
3/ Made Slack the front door for every support function. Slack ticket in, Jira ticket out. Claude triages and resolves inline if it matches precedent. Escalates with full context if not.
4/ Codified what the best reps do as Skills. Every new rep gets a sales plug-in with 5 Skills: morning brief, call prep, customer follow-up, competitive intel, create-an-asset.
Anthropic didn't replace anything. They invested in the stack they already had and let Claude be the seam between everything.
Most companies will spend 2026 evaluating AI-native sales platforms. But Anthropic did it with its current stack + Claude.
Almost none of it required new software.
Ryan Shank retweeted
just launched: @mobbin mcp 💛
your AI agents can now search 600,000+ real app screens. paywalls, onboarding, checkout, permissions — from apps that already shipped.
ai tools can write code. they just don't know what good looks like. now they do.
👉 mobbin.com/mcp